The Fastest and Slowest Websites, How to Get Budget for Frictionless Experiences, & Convert More Traffic without Spending More $$$
Blue Triangle
Only Blue Triangle will quantify revenue-robbing website friction so you can prioritize solutions for the greatest ROI.
In this issue of FRICTIONLESS:
Holiday Shopping 2024: The Fastest and Slowest Websites During Black Friday and Cyber Monday ?????
By: Chuck Moxley
Happy, Frictionless New Year!
Let's take a look back at 2024 and a strong holiday shopping season.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday continued to dominate, with sales reaching record-breaking numbers.
Black Friday: Setting the Stage for a Record-Breaking Season
Black Friday proved to be a juggernaut for online sales with a reported 10.2% increase in U.S. online spending, which reached a staggering $10.8 billion.
What's even more impressive is the pace of spending — between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Black Friday alone, consumers spent $11.3 million every minute. This surge in online activity underscores the importance of providing a frictionless experience during peak shopping days.
Black Friday 2024: The Top 20 Fastest Websites
Fast-loading websites are crucial for keeping shoppers engaged and converting visits into customers. In fact, faster sites see better conversion rates. The top 20 fastest websites this Black Friday saw significant traffic and sales, proving that site speed is an important factor for maximizing holiday revenue.
Black Friday 2024: The Top 20 Slowest Websites
On the flip side, the slowest websites struggled to keep up with the massive wave of shoppers, which can lead to higher bounce rates and abandoned carts, costing brands lost revenue.
This year, friction-filled websites made it difficult for consumers to complete their purchases, getting stuck instead of converting.
Cyber Monday: Still the King of Online Shopping
While Black Friday is a huge day for online sales, Cyber Monday remains the undisputed champion. This year, consumers spent $13.3 billion, a 7.3% increase from the previous year, surpassing Adobe's initial projection of $13.2 billion.
From 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Cyber Monday, consumers spent an eye-popping $15.8 million every minute.
Cyber Monday has solidified its status as the biggest online shopping day of all time, with many consumers saving their biggest purchases for this final shopping event.
As online retailers prepared for the holiday rush, some were up to the challenge, while others missed the mark.
For the top fastest and slowest websites during Cyber Monday, read my full blog post.
Also included:?
How to Get C-Level Buy-In for Prioritizing Frictionless Experiences in 2025
By: Chuck Moxley
You know friction on your site—anything that delays or prevents a user from reaching their goal—costs conversions and revenue. But convincing leadership can be a challenge.
Brands often need to allocate substantial resources to identify and eliminate friction, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars, especially for high-traffic sites.
To help you build a compelling case that won't break your budget, we consulted four industry experts on The Frictionless Experience podcast.
Their insights led to discovering three crucial strategies, or "Unlocks," that can persuade your C-suite to prioritize and fund these improvements.
To help you build a compelling case that won't break your budget, we consulted four industry experts on The Frictionless Experience podcast.
Their insights led to discovering three crucial strategies, or "Unlocks," that can persuade your C-suite to prioritize and fund these improvements.
Key Unlock #1: Quantify the Impact of Friction and Payback for Removing It
Budget constraints mean that many initiatives are competing for limited resources.
So, to capture leadership's attention, you must clearly demonstrate how friction impedes customers from completing transactions and quantify the financial losses it causes. This approach can be a game-changer in unlocking the necessary budget.
Here's How to Do It:
1. Tie friction to existing OKRs and KPIs that the company already cares about.
Scott Smith, former Product Director at FanDuel, highlights this method of going from clicks to conversions. As he explains on The Frictionless Experience:
So, start by connecting friction points to existing Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that your company values.
And by analyzing how friction affects traffic and conversion rates, you can provide clear data on potential improvements.
2. Focus on the sheer magnitude of potential losses if friction isn't removed before key peak periods.
On high-traffic days, if your digital experiences aren't optimized, the cost of customer dissatisfaction and lost revenue can be immense
Vijay Jayaraman, former Senior Director of Product Management at Walmart, shares on an episode of The Frictionless Experience how preparing for the impact of friction during peak times—like Black Friday or major holidays—can transform a theoretical problem into a pressing financial concern.
Vijay notes:
"On that day, your product needs to be working really, really well because that's when all the traffic is. Do I have the systems scaled up in such a way that to hold up to the test of all this traffic coming in and wanting the same items? If we were to have this problem come Black Friday, then this is going to impact millions of customers in under an hour."
3. Uncover potential improvements in satisfaction and cost savings in addition to driving more revenue.
Consider additional advantages beyond immediate revenue gains. For sectors outside of retail, such as banking, where customer loyalty and satisfaction are crucial, demonstrate how reducing friction can enhance customer experience and operational efficiency.
Shawn Sheely, former VP at U.S. Bank, emphasizes the importance of these factors.
During his episode of The Frictionless Experience, he explains:
By applying this strategy—quantifying the impact of friction—you can make a compelling case for prioritizing frictionless digital experiences.
?? Read my full-length article to unlock the remaining two strategies packed with even more tips and insights from our expert Friction Fighters to help secure funding and make frictionless?a priority.
Is Your Site or App a Leaky Bucket? Plug the Holes and Convert More of the Traffic You're Already Getting
By: Dominick Costa
“You don't need more traffic. You need to do more with the traffic that you're getting.”
That was a key takeaway from an episode of The Frictionless Experience with guest Mark Friedman , gleaned from his experience working for leading e-commerce brands including Brooks Brothers, Eddie Bauer, and Steve Madden.
More than ever, CFOs are scrutinizing budgets, forcing marketing, e-commerce, and digital product teams to do more with fewer resources. So, if you can’t invest in driving more traffic to your website, then the key to driving more sales is to convert more of the traffic you’re already getting. And at a higher Average Order Value (AOV).
Five Ways to Maximize Conversion Rates and Increase AOV
#1: Identify where and why customers are dropping out.
Nearly always, customer abandonment happens when they encounter friction on your site.
Some common friction points include: a key step not working properly or too many steps to complete a transaction, slow page speed, subpar Core Web Vitals leading to a poor user experience.
It’s kind of like pinball; any misstep on the path, and the ball — or your customer, if we are talking about a website — abandons the playing field and falls out.
Even worse than pinball, if you are a retailer: When your visitor falls out, they are not just out of play — they are beelining it to your competitors. So once you have identified where the customer ditches your site, you can and should remove those friction points. You will automatically increase conversion rates from the traffic already on your website.
And that conversion increase is often substantial! For example, last year alone, we uncovered more than $2.7 billion in revenue-robbing friction on our clients’ websites.
Large-scale retailers can have 100 or more pages with friction points. Focusing your fixes on just those few problematic pages or functions helps maximize conversion rates while intelligently deploying your limited resources on the costliest friction.
Here’s one real-world example of this from another episode of The Frictionless Experience with guest Joe Walker of Equifax .
#2: Plug up your downward-trending pages in Core Web Vitals.
You likely associate Core Web Vitals (CWV) with improving search traffic volumes. But you may not know that Google developed CWVs to provide an objective and easy-to-calculate score for how easy you’ve made your website to transact. Which means CWVs provide an objective proxy for measuring how frictionless your website experience is. This was an insight from Mike Lively of Slickdeals , that he shared on an episode of The Frictionless Experience.
“One of the best resources for me, honestly, was when Google came out with their Core Web Vitals over the last three or so years…There's a lot of body of work over the importance of those and how can you optimize your site to those metrics.”
So improving your CWV scores reduces friction that leads to increased conversions, as well as getting better search results by implementing Google's best practices.
Want to learn how? Check out these two resources:
? Download our eBook detailing 3 Strategies to Maximize Conversions NOW.
? Get the rest of our conversion rate maximizing tips from this article: 5 Ways to Increase Conversion Rates from the Site Traffic You're Already Getting.
? Follow The Frictionless Experience on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player app so you receive a notification each time we publish a new episode ?
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